New Delhi: The Gujarat high court has acquitted a Bharatiya Janata Party former member of parliament and six others for the killing of Right to Information activist Amit Jethwa, castigating the investigation as one that was taken up to ensure that the “truth is buried forever.”
Jethwa was shot dead in 2019 by two men near the Gujarat high court premises in Ahmedabad. He had he tried to expose illegal mining activities in the Gir forest region, allegedly involving BJP’s Dinu Solanki, through RTI applications.
Initially, the Crime Branch of Ahmedabad conducted the investigation. In 2019, Solanki and six others were convicted by a special Central Bureau of Investigation court and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Indian Express has reported that on Monday, May 6, the high court division bench of Justices A.S. Supehia and Vimal K. Vyas noted that the entire investigation was an eyewash at best and that all efforts were made in burying the truth for ever. “The perpetrators have succeeded in doing so,” the court said.
It said the case “will be reminisced as an antithesis to ‘Satyamev Jayate [the truth will prevail]’”. It also said that it was “appalling and equally astounding” that the assailants were not held and escaped “from the limits of Ahmedabad city” after the murder.
The court also called the CBI’s investigation, particularly, “slipshod and perfunctory.”
The bench, recording that the High Court had reposed faith in the CBI while handing over the investigation, said, “the CBI has also carried out a slipshod and perfunctory investigation.”
It said that it found that “Investigating Officers have failed to observe the untainted standards” and that “the learned Public Prosecutor has also failed in his duty.”
“The cross-examination of hostile witnesses appears to be an empty formality. No efforts are made to extract relevant evidence, which has corroborative value. The witnesses…were all enjoying police protection, but all of them have turned hostile and have ditched the prosecution,” the court added.
The court said that it found it strange that the CBI officer Mukesh Sharma ignored or forgot to visit the place where the alleged conspiracy was hatched, Harmadiya Farm and made no effort to link it to BJP’s Dinu Solanki.
“The most glaring aspect is that there is no data collected from the mobile phone of the deceased, though the call records were available,” it said.
The court said that the investigation appears to have been deliberately botched “in order to alter the final outcome of complicity of the accused in the crime.”
